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Eastering on the edge

It’s Easter and family, as well as friends who feel like family, are coming for lunch. At some time during the meal and the chatter I will be briefly but     aware of missing faces –  loved family members who once had a seat at the table, children, and their children, who live far away and the one or two who usually choose to absent themselves from  family gatherings. It’s a joyful occasion, being together for a few hours, not long enough really for relationship cracks to show. Because the cracks are there and all joy is tempered with regrets and loss.

There will be some family stories at our Easter lunch but I’m guessing there will be no mention of the Christ we are actually celebrating. We are a long way from the first Christians, gathered around a table set with bread and wine, telling their stories of Jesus over and over again. The shared pain of losing Jesus and the joy of his presence in memories of him gave them strength and connectedness to take back to their daily lives. I wonder how soon after his death did his followers carry out Jesus’ request, “Do this in memory of me”? 

My family, and I suspect many other families, don’t speak that language any more. Somehow, amid our must-have technology we’ve lost the religious and symbolic language we need to grasp the mysterious reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Chocolate bunnies don’t exactly fill the gap. Yet we are constantly reading each other’s Good Friday and Easter Sunday stories.

There won’t be an adult person sitting at my table this Easter who hasn’t experienced pain, grief, rejection, maybe even despair. They are familiar with joy and the vague ache that comes with it, that desire to stay in the moment, the deep down voice that says, “But wait, there’s more”. 

There’s a God pull in all our deaths and resurrections but we seem to have forgotten how to decipher God- language.  We don’t know how to read God in our own stories. Even when we share them with a friend or partner or put them on Facebook for all to see, it’s never quite enough. Two thousand years of institutional structures and wordiness have turned faith into religion, and it’s a poor substitute.

I will place a growing plant on the dinner table along with the chocolate Easter eggs and remember Jesus’ earthy words about seeds and dying and new life bursting out of that dying.  We may not be celebrating with bread and wine, but the substitutes will be enjoyed. The talk will tumble around the table and there will be laughter and a renewed appreciation and tolerance of each other. And I will know that Jesus is a guest at my table.

May you find splinters of peace amid the complexities of your Easter.

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Words from the Edge is going to take a break for a few months while I concentrate on a  book I’m trying  to write – working title, Everyday Mystics.

Some years ago I read these words attributed to Jesuit Karl Rahner: “In the days ahead, a Christian will either be a mystic or nothing at all.” I was of the opinion that mystic was a churchy kind of word, applicable to women and men who lived in convents and monasteries and prayed day and night. But as I learnt more about religious spirituality I gradually began to understand that this isn’t so. Mysticism is not book knowledge of religion, it’s not tagging along with an expert’s take on things mystical, but it’s trusting the value of one’s own inner experience.

Now I am trying to write a book that might go a little way in liberating words traditionally used to talk about spirituality and mysticism, both religious and new-age, and replace them with language that feels at home at the kitchen table, using words and experiences that tap into the reader’s own,

I began writing it early in 2019, but it’s been sitting at the halfway-stage for months now. I could blame Covid 19 for the delay but that wouldn’t be quite honest. Now I’m going to give it another go and I’d appreciate your prayerful support. If you feel so inclined, maybe you could share with me your experience of the mystic that you hide in your everyday.

Judith Scully  

In 2009 my brother gave me a website for my birthday. I named it Tarella Spirituality, in memory of the Mallee country space and silence that surrounded my long-gone grandparents’ farm. Unlike my ancestors, I’ve never sown a paddock with wheat or barley seed, but I do see myself as a kind of seed planter – planting spirituality seeds, and it’s Jesus’ seed parables like the one below that keep me going when my Tarella Spirituality seeds float away from my edgy space and into the everlasting space that is the internet.

The sower went forth to sow.

The thing about planting seeds is the uncertainty of it all. As I watched the TV footage of banner-waving women calling for a stop to sexual violence against women in this week’s Women’s March 4 Justice, my mind wandered back through the long line of women, mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, memorable teachers and women who broke barriers, right down to women across these country who had gathered to demand justice and equality for themselves and their daughters and grand-daughters.

Only God knows what will come from similar seeds that have been planted over centuries of oppression. Will the soil of custom and indifference that we live in begin to break up and those long planted seeds sprout and green into a more equitable and non-violent world. I hope that they will not lose heart, not get tied up in set-backs and frustrations, and gradually wither away.        

A while back Clarissa Pinkola Estes said something that I have found heartening in the face of political, legal and religious pressures that have squashed similar demands in the past. Do not lose heart. We were made for these times. We are built well for these times. Despite stints of doubt, your frustrations in righting all that needs change right now . . .  we are not alone.

Seed-planting is collaborative: God, you and I, do it together. It’s not just about justice and equality for women in all walks of life, or the place of women in one of the last strongholds of male power – the Catholic Church. It stretches across to loving care for the aged and disabled, a whole-hearted acceptance of the debt we owe to Australia’s Aboriginal population, and an open-armed welcome for people who have fled war and terrorism. The seed planting goes on.

An Arab proverb says: Every morning I turn my face to the wind and scatter my seed.

Now, it is not difficult to scatter seeds, but it takes courage to go on facing the wind.

And Jesus the seed-planter said, ‘A man throws the seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing, how, he does not know. ‘

 And the sower went on sowing.

Judith Scully ( judith@judithscully.com.au)